Well, we've had some pretty bodacious dips due to the FUD with south korea and the insider trading shit that their government has been doing. Yet, the market is still alive and growing after the weak hands have been shaken out. Crypto certainly isn't going away.

I bought during a couple of those dips. Haven't sold a thing.

I started ethereum mining in 06-2017, and i remember that it was very hard to buy a GPU back then. It's even crazier today.. buying graphics card at the moment is close to impossible.

I'm 24 and feel like I'm far too old to even begin to understand this crypto madness.

I can scare you even further. The International Monetary Fund has its' own crypto currency. It's called the SDR. Special Drawing Rights. I suspect the basic scam is to get China to be left holding the bag as it collapses, as China buys them up from whomever the IMF gives them out to. China has some gold in their national reserve, but also some U.S. Treasury bonds as well as the SDRs. So an international monetary crisis much as 2008 is really gotta nail them, eh? But it turns out that the richer people in China own 4 times as much gold as their government, in fact they own more than the United States government or all the Eurozone governments. . . .

I have access to a twin CPU Xeon e5 2603v4 6-core with 256GB RAM and an Nvidia quadro M4000 graphics card with free electricity that's sat idle 99% of the time. Would this be any use?

That would be awesome for mining Monero or any other cryptonote based coin.

I am currently mining turtlecoin ( cryptonote algo ) on 2 of 4 cores on my machine, and ethereum on 2 GPUs.. it's a nice setup..
Putting 12 cores to work on turtlecoin cpu mining would be pretty nice ...

Oh yeah, here we go. It's for the "Little guy." All this self righteous indignation about how they deserve something for nothing and people want to keep them from what's theirs. Next thing you know they lose big and they're howling about Wall Street did it to them. Not that Wall Street has any power over BItCoin, but it's how the game is played, blame Wall Street. It's all the pavements' fault.